Pretoria, South Africa
November 11, 5:27 P.M.
General Tobias Krummeck, chief intelligence officer of the South African National Defence Force, woke with a start when the smartphone played the nineteenth-century hymn “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika”—“Lord Bless Africa.” He picked up the phone and squinted at the time then looked at the caller ID. Only the number had come up. It was local but he did not recognize it.
He got off the bed where he and his wife had just exhausted themselves for the better part of an hour, and headed toward the adjoining bathroom as he tapped the Answer icon.
“What is it?” Krummeck said thickly from under his woolly white mustache.
“General, it’s Raeburn.”
It took another moment for the name to bore through the remnants of sleep. Krummeck was instantly awake.
“Hold,” the senior officer said.
There were not many things that the medical officer could be calling about. It had been at least a year since they had spoken last, a chance encounter at a cocktail reception for veterans of the first and second battles of El Alamein. The men had said very little and barely looked at one another. Like illicit lovers, each was a little afraid of the secret they shared.
The general shut the bathroom door, lowered the lid on the toilet, and pulled a bathrobe from its hook behind the door. He threw it over his stooped shoulders, suddenly very chilly.
“What is it?” the old soldier asked as he sat.
“We appear to have had a containment leak, sir.”
Tinnitus and an echo in the bathroom made the general mistrust what he had heard. He asked the caller to repeat it. He had heard correctly.
“What happened?” the general demanded. Though the words were calm, it took effort to get them out.
The general had been asleep and had missed the news of the jetliner crash. Raeburn brought him up to date. The senior officer sat like something broken, helpless and still. The horror of it all—and the dread of what might follow—sank into his soul even as his brain was still wrestling with it.
“Still active?” Krummeck said when Raeburn was finished. “In that cold? And a leak. How are these things possible, dammit?”
“Corrosive salt water, an underwater geologic event, possibly currents knocking the canister against the wall—”
“You’re talking about five inches of steel-reinforced concrete!”
“Sir, I told you at the time that all the bug needed to escape was a vent four micrometers wide—”
“You also told me it would be—the words you used were ‘contentedly inert in the cold’!”
“Sir, I’ve been thinking about that. The truth is I’ve never stopped thinking about it. We engineered the bacterium to seek a specific target, one that was itself evolving. Maybe the mutagenic properties we built in were more versatile than we imagined. We did not exactly run exhaustive exit-strategy tests when we aborted.”
No, Krummeck had to admit. The goal was to get rid of it as soon as possible. The military and political situation was too volatile.
“All right, let me think a moment,” the general said. “Survival in the air,” he said. “What about that?”
“One hour maximum but, again, we don’t know what may have changed. We are talking about many, many generations of bacterial life having passed.”
While the general thought, Dr. Raeburn sat in his small office listening to the silence of indecision, looking into the past. He was not ashamed about what they had done. But by his soul, he regretted the mix of eagerness followed by urgency that had brought them here.…
Just over a dozen years ago, Raeburn’s nation was in chaos. Migration, illegal and legal, had strained South Africa’s infrastructure. The system was already stressed by the AIDS pandemic and the lingering resentment and petty political vengeance on both sides that followed the end of apartheid. Riots killed hundreds and displaced over one hundred thousand.
A specialist in communicable diseases, Raeburn thought he might have a solution to one of those problems.
The military was a microcosm of the split and combative civil government. The old guard sought a resurgence, rising leaders sought to crush it. There was no middle ground to either side. Because of that, the medical officer had circumvented navy channels with his idea—and, thus, went off the radar.
Raeburn had requested, and easily secured, a meeting with Minister of Health Barbara Niekerk. The pulmonologist had been a fellow student at Stellenbosch University in the Western Cape Province. Raeburn knew her to be a person of conscience and suspected she would sidestep protocol for peace.
“It will be good to see you,” she had told him, “but understand that two white doctors, even when they are helping the black population, will be perceived as throwbacks.”
Raeburn did not doubt the truth of that. He also did not care. It was one of those reactionary, ultimately fatal idiocies for which he had no time or patience.
When they met for dinner, just old schoolmates, what Raeburn had to say surprised her. Sitting in a quiet corner of a quiet restaurant, he began by asking her security clearance.
“Level Two,” she had replied, surprised.
“Higher than mine,” he had replied, then smiled. “There is nothing I’m about to tell you that you cannot know.”
“About the state of medicine in our own nation?”
“That’s right,” he had replied.
She had asked, only half-joking, “Because I am white, because I am a woman, or both?”
“Remember when pendulums only swung from side to side?” he asked. “We live in a complex society.”
Now she was surprised and mildly offended, but also intrigued. “Go on.”
He told her that his plan had come about because of events more than four thousand miles away. A year earlier, in 2007, the United States and Iraq had signed a status of forces agreement that required American troops to withdraw from Iraq in two years. In a rare show of internal accord, the South African administrative capital in Pretoria, the legislative capital in Cape Town, and the judicial capital in Bloemfontain were all concerned about warlords and renegades throughout the region suddenly having access to stockpiles of biological weapons.
The Military Health Service was charged—not by the then minister of health but by the commander in chief of the South African National Defence Force—with establishing a group of scientists to seek cures to diseases suspected of being weaponized. Chief among these were anthrax and Ebola. Because of his training and fieldwork, Raeburn was placed in command.
“Someone in Pretoria possessed a dark sense of humor or self-importance, possibly both, when they named the program,” Raeburn told Niekerk.
It was called the Bio-Weapons and Necrotic Actinism Program. “BWANA” was East African for “master.”
Barbara Niekerk was surprised by two things. First, that she knew nothing about the program. Second, that the military had managed to keep a secret.
“But you’re not telling me all of this out of fellowship and school loyalty,” she had said over dinner.
“No,” he had said. “I’ve stumbled upon something that requires a separate research group—and funding.”
“Something you cannot share with the military, your superiors?” she had asked.
“It’s a domestic matter and a potentially explosive one. It is specifically on the list of diseases the military was not asked to … ‘solve,’ was the word used in the written order. It was actually footnoted as, ‘This is a problem that falls squarely and solely under the jurisdiction of the Public Service and Administration Department of Home Affairs in Pretoria.”
“AIDS?” Niekerk had asked.
Raeburn had nodded. “We may have found a cure.”
“Not a vaccine,” she clarified.
“No. I think we have created something to extract the virus itself. We engineered it from Campylobacter jejuni, which is drawn to cold. We believe we can ‘train it,’ if you will, to grab the virus and depart a feverish body.”
Niekerk was flabbergasted, momentarily mute, impressed, proud, hopeful, and scared for her classmate’s breach of the chain of command.
“You could go to prison for life,” she had pointed out after recovering slightly.
“At least I will still have a life,” he had replied. “And a soul. If I don’t do this, or at least try—”
Niekerk said she understood. She did not have to consider the proposal. She told him that she would pull money from a discretionary fund. Two days later, answering only to Raeburn, BWANA had a pocket team working on the problem.
Six months later—having had little communication—Raeburn and Niekerk had another dinner.
“There is good news and bad news,” he had told his sponsor.
The good news was that they had indeed come up with a bacterium capable of clearing the AIDS virus from patients in 100 percent of cases.
“It was actually an easy find,” he had told her. “We snare the virus with a bacterium that is, in effect, vulnerable to white blood cells. It is also heat sensitive and seeks to get out via feverish perspiration and urine. When it leaves, it takes the AIDS virus with it. We call it the Exodus bug.”
“That has a hopeful sound.”
“It does, I suppose. It could also suggest the Lord who smiteth, a God of war. Unfortunately, it isn’t the reason we chose the name.”
“The bad news.”
“Early on, we had to deal with the white blood cells killing individual Exodus bugs before they could complete the journey. That set the AIDS virus free—the process was worthless. We had to aggregate them—essentially, get the bugs to reproduce swiftly and cluster around each virus. White blood cells come en masse but the bacteria learned—blunt survival, of course, not thought—they learned to form layers to finish the trip to the promised land.”
Niekerk had eyed the doctor. “The bad news is the tenacity of the white blood cells,” she had said. “You rid the body of an immune-suppressing virus … but you take the body’s only defenses with it.”
“That’s part of the bad news,” Raeburn had agreed. “The white blood cells cling to their prey all the way out. Virtually any infection can kill the patient. We’ve simply reinvented the AIDS problem.”
“Well, you didn’t quite do that, did you?” Niekerk said. “In time, the white blood cells will repopulate and the patient will survive.”
“Correct.”
“I see. The rest of the bad news is the caveat. Each patient must live in a sterile environment for weeks … maybe months,” Niekerk had said. She had smirked. “A single human life is beyond evaluation yet the cost per person would be unthinkable.”
“I’m sorry,” Raeburn had told her.
Niekerk told him what he already knew: the solution was profoundly admirable but impossible. The government already spent 15 percent of its annual budget on health care. This program would have trebled that. Raeburn asked for an extension of the project with a scaled-down staff to try and find a way to hide the Exodus bug from white blood cells.
But the money had run out. Permission was regrettably denied.
“And Gray,” she had said, “you’re a man with a conscience. But if you seek to go out of country with this, they will hang you. In time, you may find a solution.”
“You know the damn thing?” he had said. “The bug loses mobility in the air rather quickly and dies without a host. Sixty minutes at the most. It can’t harm the patient, then.”
“Just everything else in the air,” she lamented.
Enter then-Major General Tobias Krummeck.
Raeburn was surprised but not shocked to learn that ever since BWANA had been established, the intelligence officer had a team following and eavesdropping on Raeburn. In a government of widely divided loyalties, no one with access to potential war and anti-war matériel could be entirely trusted.
Krummeck had summoned Raeburn and funded a continuation of his research. When Raeburn had reasonably asked why, Krummeck had answered that if a cure were not found, not just this government but the entire system of government in South Africa might fall.
“People can be bludgeoned into giving up smoking, even narcotics, but not sex,” he had said. “There is a faction in the South African Communist Party that wants to arrange ‘chance’ encounters with young, infected men and women with susceptible leaders to take them down. This must not be.”
Raeburn was impressed with the levels of Krummeck’s penetration into the SACP inner circle, and said so.
“Not how it happened,” he had said. “I was a target.”
Work on the Exodus bug continued for a year. Raeburn was the only researcher on the project. The results were worse than before.
“To strengthen each bacterium means they survive ejection from the body,” the exhausted doctor had said at the end of it. “Inhaled, it immediately draws white blood cells to it, causing congestion that instantly collapses arterial walls.”
“A formidable weapon,” Krummeck had observed.
Raeburn had been instantly electrified by that remark—and the pensive, unfrightened expression that came with it. He did not know, at that moment, sitting in Krummeck’s office, if that had been the real motivation for the continued research. Not a bug but a potential Exodus plague to unleash against the opposition.
“Sir,” Raeburn had replied with unutterable caution, “this thing is murderous on a level we cannot even conceive. Instantly lethal and ungovernable. It can’t survive more than an hour in the air, but think of a city. A dense population would be devastated, urban centers would suffer hundreds of thousands if not millions of casualties within hours.”
“I understand, truly. You gave it a try. You’re sure that further research won’t—”
“Help? If by ‘help’ you mean finding a better way to kill millions in a matter of days, that’s what we are looking at, sir. We have to erase everything. I am going to destroy all the research.”
“I see. How do you safely dispose of the bacterium itself? It seeks a cold environment, you’ve explained—fire, then? Immolate it?”
“That will work, in theory, but if even one germ survives it can seek a host and replicate. At that size, we cannot be sure. No, better to put it in an environment where we know it will wish to stay. A freezer, perhaps.”
“No,” Krummeck had said. “We do not want it where a rogue officer or agent can stumble upon it. We must treat this like radioactive waste. Dispose of it, inter it, but in cold.”
Raeburn had then conceived of his plan for a secret subantarctic burial. The bacteria were encapsulated. The program was killed.
But apparently not the bugs.
Raeburn stopped remembering. He had gotten good at that over the intervening years. And the team that had accompanied him on the mission to Prince Edward had not known what they were handling.
If in fact the bug had been responsible for the felling of the commercial aircraft, Raeburn was sorry. But this was not the time to affix blame or to find explanation for the bacterium’s survival.
“We have to quarantine and destroy at least the source,” Krummeck said, coming out of his silence with the obvious.
“I suggest napalm,” Raeburn said.
The general actually laughed. “That’s a solution, of course. And with civilian authorities on the way to Marion Island, they will of course not notice a firestorm on Prince Edward.”
“General, this is the Exodus plague we once discussed! This is not a time to consider—”
“Our careers? Prison? Try this thought, Doctor. Who but you can possibly fix the problem? Do you imagine that, once arrested, you will have access to a laboratory in a timely fashion?”
The general was correct about that. And it did not solve all their problems. There were still samples at 35,000 feet. The cold and thinness of the air might enable them to survive longer than an hour.
“All right,” Raeburn said. “I hear that.”
“Good. What about the wreck? Is there any chance of the bacteria having survived?”
“Not likely.”
“Even in bodies?”
“If the flame did not destroy them, the heat, reaching about fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, would have killed them.”
“Then we have some time before outside medics autopsy whatever remains,” Krummeck said. “We need eyes on the site. You say there’s a navy helicopter on Prince Edward? Can the fuel be used to incinerate the bug?”
“Yes, but if the block is only fractionally split it can also open the vent wider.”
“Christ, Raeburn. Christ. We can’t have an amateur fumbling around out there. You’ll have to go.”
Raeburn had been circling, unhappily, that same conclusion. “Yes, sir.”
“Where are you?” Krummeck asked.
“My office at Saldanha Bay.”
“The training facility?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Take—I don’t know. Take whatever equipment you can get together.”
“I’ll need explosives if the pit has been exposed.”
“Thermite grenades?”
“That seems the most expedient way to close it, for now.”
“Very well. I’ll have a helicopter there to meet them, designated as MAP-14. Special team—as last time. After that, you are not to contact me again unless it is with an all-clear alert. Is that understood?”
“Is that an order, General?”
“It is emphatically an order,” Krummeck replied. “I will clear it with Environmental Management. Good luck,” he added, and hung up.
Raeburn was not surprised or especially disappointed by the general’s moderate, largely hands-off reaction. The South African Environmental Management people would not interfere because of the civilian crash. And it made sense for Raeburn to go to the island—even if Military Assistance Program-14 designated this as a civilian assist project, and to the wrong island.
He went to a locker and removed six hazmat masks: two for the men on Marion, two for the flight crew, one for him, one spare. They were from the same shipment he had used when he initially developed the Exodus bug. The expiration date on the seals was just a month away. That meant the vulcanized rubber was within six or seven weeks of shrinking to unreliability.
Given the size of the bacterium, that was not optimal. But that was the best they could get right now. Placing the masks in a pair of aluminum carrying cases, and getting his cold-weather gear from an adjoining locker, a tired Gray Raeburn filled two backpacks with medical supplies and grabbed his microscope case. Then, his arms awkwardly full, he headed through the corridors to the small helipad not far from the science facilities.
He was about to leave when his phone chimed.
“Shit,” he said, rejecting the call and hurrying out.